Abstract
Extensible Assurance Reporting Language (XARL) was initially developed by Boritz and No (2003) to enable assurance providers to report on the integrity of Extensible business reporting language (XBRL) documents distributed over the Internet. Providing assurance on XBRL documents using XARL could help users and companies reduce the uncertainty about the integrity of those documents and provide users with trustworthy information that they could place warranted reliance upon. A limitation of the initial conception of XARL was its tight linkage with the XBRL document and the comparatively primitive approach to codifying the XARL taxonomy. In this paper, we have reconceptualized the idea of XARL as a stand-alone service for providing assurance on potentially any Extensible Markup Language-based information being shared over the Internet. While our illustrative application in this paper continues to be XBRL-coded financial information, the code that underlies this version of XARL is a significant revision of our earlier implementation of XARL, is compatible with the latest version of XBRL, and moves XARL into the web services arena.